Author: gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book, "Does the United States Have a Future?" was published on 12 October 2017. Both paperback and e-book versions are available for purchase on http://www.amazon.com and all affiliated Amazon websites worldwide. See the recent professional review http://theduran.com/does-the-united-states-have-a-future-a-new-book-by-gilbert-doctorow-review/ For a video of the book presentation made at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. on 7 December 2017 see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciW4yod8upg

As a certified “dupe of Putin” in the eyes of our McCarthyite, mob rule majority that speaks for the American foreign policy establishment, I use this opportunity to restate my claim to independent thinking about the big issues of responsibility for the ongoing and escalating New Cold War, including each and every major incident along the way.

If only there were no consequences for you, dear reader, for myself and for the 7 billion plus other souls on this planet, I would say “a pox on both your houses” in address to the political leaderships of both the US-EU “global community” (formerly known as the “free world”) and the Russian Federation (formerly known as the “empire of evil”). However, any such curse will rebound on us.

To put it in the language of the once fashionable MIT bard of the 1960s Tom Lehrer: “we will all go together when we go.” For this reason, let us take the time to sort out where this spiral of action and reaction, where the mutual contempt and provocations are taking us and what, if anything, we simple mortals outside government can do about it.

It is axiomatic in these days of anti-Russian hysteria in Washington, in London, in Brussels, that whatever reverses there may be to political control by the globalist, liberal democracy elites with their new age culture of pro-women, pro-LGBT, pro multiculturalism, etc. agendas you can be sure the cry will go up: “the Russians did it.” The Russians were responsible for the sports doping of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, where they captured the lion’s share of gold medals. They were responsible for the annexation of Crimea and intervened militarily with “hybrid warfare” to protect the insurgencies in the Donbass. They were responsible for the MH-17 airliner crash. They hacked into the Democratic National Committee server, disseminated their anti-Clinton trove of documents via Wikileaks and otherwise interfered egregiously in the 2016 US presidential elections. They have supported the criminal regime of Bashar Assad in Syria who uses chemical weapons against his own civilian population. Most recently the Kremlin organized the chemical poisoning of their ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England using their chemical warfare agent Novichok.

The official Russian response to most of these allegations of misdeeds has been “show us the proof,” or let us investigate this incident jointly, as our shared international conventions require. Their main weapon of self-defense has been to pour scorn on their accusers. Brimming with sarcasm, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has repeatedly mocked British PM Theresa May for relying on unproven but “highly likely” argumentation in support of her clamoring for ever more sanctions to be imposed on Russia.

In fact, it has been my peers in the small Russia-friendly camp of Western experts who have published articles detailing the holes in the narratives of Russian wrong-doing put out by US and European media with government backing. Some of my colleagues have relevant professional knowledge in military sciences, in Information Systems and how they operate to support their point for point refutations of the allegations against Russia. Others do not have any added value to contribute, but nonetheless do not stop at the water’s edge; instead they plunge into highly technical aspects of the charges against Russia and counter-charges.

As a general rule, I have stayed clear of these debates on anti-Russian narratives in their details, seeing no possibility of contributing anything new. When I have spoken on scandals of the day, as for example the Skripal case, I have addressed only the overarching question of whether the allegations made any sense if the investigator applied the acid test of cui bono, meaning whose interests could be served by the given crime. And on this basis I found the entire case against the Kremlin to be without merit.

It would have been nonsensical for the Kremlin to murder a former spy who had served his time, had been pardoned and expelled to his handlers in London, and to do this after the passage of many years just a couple of weeks before the opening of the World Cup of Football in Russia, for which the country had invested more than $10 billion in an exercise of Soft Power. On the other hand, for MI6 to have staged this assassination attempt at a location very close to its Porton Down chemical weapons facility as a provocation to blacken the image of Russia at precisely that moment, ahead of a sporting event that would attract the attention of global audiences, makes perfect sense in the context of an escalating information, economic and geopolitical war and the clear objective of isolating Russia, turning it into a pariah state. Anyone who thinks that the “fair play” Brits could not possibly be so cynical and immoral as to engage in assassination for raisons d’état should go back to their kindergarten benches. Those of us wearing long trousers know better.

Regrettably, recent developments have prompted me to rethink the whole logic of cui bono under present-day conditions when no side’s position can be taken at face value and when, quite possibly, all sides are actively engaged in propaganda and provocation.

I was prompted to reconsider my position by a couple of developments in the past two weeks. The first was the remarkable answer that Vladimir Putin gave to a questioner who asked about the Skripal case during the meeting with the press at the Russia Energy Week international forum in St Petersburg. This was just after the British released what they called the real names and GRU affiliations of the two alleged perpetrators of the poisoning. That identification directly contradicted the Russian president’s assertion at the Eastern Economic forum in Vladivostok 12 September, when he claimed the two were ordinary civilians, “not criminals.”

Now Putin called Sergey Skripal not only treasonous but подонок, a term sometimes translated as riff-raff but more pungently translatable as “scum.” That Putin dropped all pretense of diplomacy suggested strongly to me that there is more to the issue than meets the eye and that his prevarication was exposed.

A still bigger prompt to rethink came a few days later when Sergei Lavrov responded to the breaking news that in April the Dutch had expelled 4 Russians carrying service passports who had been caught near the headquarters of the world chemical weapons inspection organization (OPCW) in a rented car which had electronic snooping equipment in the trunk.

Under circumstances which appear to be fairly straightforward and are proven by published photos, Lavrov could have acknowledged that Russian agents were nailed but gone on to explain the reasons justifying the intended hacking into OPCW computers, namely the way Western powers have actively compromised the impartiality of the institution’s activities as regards the supposed chemical attacks in Syria and in the Skripal case.

Lavrov did not do that. Instead he presented a cock and bull story that the 4 chaps whom the Dutch police nabbed were there to do routine security checks on the Russian embassy. And the Russian Foreign Ministry went on the offensive, charging the Dutch with violating a gentlemen’s agreement about the case, going public only months later at a politically opportune moment.

To be sure, I never believed that the leadership and state entities of the Russian Federation were bunny rabbits. But their image as mostly truthful and sincere about seeking peaceful relations with the West was badly tarnished by these latest developments.

Moreover my concerns from these developments fit into a context of disillusionment with the degree of impartiality of Russian state television, which, as recently as a year ago I still found bracing. Apart from the coverage earlier this year of the presidential electoral campaign and in particular the granting of air time to uncensored debates among the candidates, Russian state television has steadily displaced genuine news, commentary and talk shows with repetitive heavy propaganda. The share of broadcasting given to the overall situation in Ukraine and to the civil war in Donbass, in particular, has become mind-numbing.

Over the past couple of years, Russian state television has daily disseminated the view that Ukraine is one step away from economic and political collapse. This is patently untrue. On the major Russian political talk shows we see the same Ukrainian crazies and the same smug Russian politicians engaged in sterile thrust and repartee. And the tone of presenters, such as Yevgeni Popov and Olga Skabeeva on the widely watched talk show “60 Minutes” has become shrill and offensive.

Taking all of these observations into account, I conclude that a significant part of the Russian ruling elites stands for worsening relations with the West, and that their cui bono would be well served by events like the Skripal poisoning, all the more so if it were carried out in such manner as to be identifiably Kremlin sponsored and lead to the scandalous rupture of relations with the United Kingdom that ensued.

In this overall concept of what is occurring, we have mirror images in Russia and the USA of Deep States that earnestly seek a New Cold War as a confirmation of national identity. The confrontation is more than a tool to hold onto power. It is the means of ensuring allocation of state resources to the military industrial complexes.

In the Russian case, the confrontation, with its sanctions and embargos has made possible a reindustrialization that eluded the Russian state under conditions of friendly relations with the Wes and allocations of investment funds along purely market-dictated terms, which meant high concentration of investment in the exploration, production and export of hydrocarbons at the expense of all other industrial sectors.

As for the United States and Europe, the New Cold War has reinvigorated the moribund NATO alliance, given it a purpose for existence and heavy investment in expansion. It has given a new lease on life to American global hegemony.

So what can we, the peoples do about this?

The first thing is to try harder to get our minds around the challenge. Batting down false narratives put up by Western media is a futile and insufficient response. There are ever more false flag provocations in the pipeline and no one outside a small circle of experts takes an interest in the often highly technical elements of such argumentation.

The way forward has to be political mobilization of an anti-war movement that is not engaged in the blame game, but rises above it in the knowledge that all sides in the New Cold War are lying, posturing and engaging in propaganda at our expense. Until and unless political activists can focus their minds on this single objective of a broad anti-war coalition the world will continue its creep towards Armageddon.

In the third week of July, we heard about the ambitions of Steve Bannon, strategist of Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016, to set up a coordination office, tentatively based here in Brussels, that would bring together and promote the populist movements across Europe, shepherding them into his own AltRight camp. Bannon was said to be modeling himself after George Soros as outside influencer and heavy weight in European affairs. Soros has been financing Liberal, pro-EU, Antlanticist political agents on the Continent now for decades through Open Society and other channels. Of course, Bannon would be furthering diametrically opposite politics from Soros. The immediate objective would be to change the political calculus of Europe for the May 2019 Continent-wide elections and specifically to capture one third of the seats in the European Parliament for Euro-skeptics of all stripes.

Politico and The Daily Beast carried the story on the 22nd and 23rd. On 24 July, Roland Freudenstein, an author at the Martens Centre, a mainstream think tank in Brussels pooh-poohed the notion that Bannon had the intellectual capacity or charm sufficient to lead European populists. Freudenstein also dismissed the possibility that nationalists or populists could by definition submit to any supranational project given their inherent isolationism and focus on domestic concerns. See https://www.martenscentre.eu/blog/steve-bannon-coming-brussels-dont-hold-your-breath.

Freudenstein appears to have come to his conclusions from his reading of France’s right-wing politics and from his consideration of the policy contradictions between even such reputed allies as the Polish and Hungarian nationalists who are presently challenging in tandem the principles of liberal democracy emanating from Brussels but are dogs and cats when the issue turns to relations with Russia.

I do not dispute Freudenstein’s conclusion that Bannon has only slight chances of succeeding in his mission. However, the abstract reasoning that Freudenstein applied has its limitations. I say “abstract” because I am doubtful that he ever got down from his ivory tower to discuss Bannon with live members of the European Far Right or Far Left.

It is very common for folks in centrist politics here to shun politicians at the extremes, as if a handshake and a shared lunch would discredit them forever among their mainstream peers. I have no such prejudices. It is my rule to enter into discussion with all men of good will and certifiable intelligence, whatever political label they wear on their sleeve. That is how you learn and, possibly, grow.

Indeed my recent lunchtime chat with one of the founding members of the National Front who worked alongside Jean-Marie Le Pen and has been a long time Member of the European Parliament yielded some highly relevant observations not only on why Bannon is unlikely to succeed, but also on who is more likely to wield influence on Europe’s Euroskeptics and populists as we go into the 2019 elections.

Going back to 2016, there have been lines of communication between Bannon and nationalists, populists, and EU skeptics like Geert Wilder in The Netherlands, Nigel Farage of the U.K. and Marine Le Pen in France over defense of national sovereignty against the immigration policies, multiculturalism, and radical social values being promoted from Brussels. The most visible evidence of their comradery was perhaps the guest speaker slot given to Bannon when Le Pen convened her party’s gathering in Lille in May of this year.

However, the party faithful were not enthusiastic about Bannon’s presence. Not because their sympathies are anti-American, as Freudenstein supposes, but because they see no reason to submit to an agenda set on another continent. My interlocutor sees no magnetic force in Bannon, whereas there are such personalities within the European populist movements, particularly among those in power.

Le Pen and Wilder may be in the opposition, but Matteo Salvini and Sebastian Kunz are in power in Italy and Austria, respectively. Both have the strength of personality, energy and physical attractiveness of youth, suaveness in managing relations with political competitors and intellectual acuity to give credibility and force to the assorted populist movements rising across Europe, where Bannon is just a big mouth.

In the case of Kunz, his most visible feature is charm and prudence, avoiding giving unnecessary offense, a quality that Bannon never learned. In the case of Salvini, it is strategic and tactical brilliance. He got the attention of the broad Italian public by his stand against the boatloads of immigrants. But he also countered his would be defamers from the political mainstream by offering financial outreach to the countries in Africa and Southern Asia whence the big immigration flows are coming for the sake of agreed repatriation and also to reduce the economic hardship propelling emigration. Moreover, once established in the Government, he quickly moved on to a broader agenda of promoting economic growth in Italy by loosening the budgetary purse strings in defiance of Brussels’ continuing counterproductive emphasis on austerity. As for the European Union, Salvini’s objective is to return the European Union to its status before the Maastricht Treaty, meaning an economic community rather than supra-national sovereign entity. In this vision, many of the powers now exercised in Brussels would go back to the Member States. To achieve this, clearly Salvini has to reach across national borders and engage directly with other populist movements. He needs no mentoring from Bannon to see this.

For a very good insight into the remarkable intellect and personality of Matteo Salvini, I heartily recommend his recent interview with Stephen Sackur on the BBC’s show Hard Talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SihWTOyICco Salvini, not Bannon, is clearly the man to watch going forward. In this sense, the smugness that results from Roland Freudenstein’s dismissal of Bannon as a spent force and his view of European populists as lacking in competent leadership is misplaced.

Another side of mainstream complacency that should be jettisoned is the notion that identity politics is the enemy of democracy and panders only to base instincts. Here in Belgium, the most forthright defenders of national borders against unrestricted immigration is the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), which is at the same time the “power behind the throne” of Prime Minister Charles Michel, holding the portfolios of Ministry of Interior and the secretary of state for Asylum and Migration. While the repatriation efforts of this government have been decried as in violation of human rights, the Secretary of State in question, Theo Francken, is no rude xenophobe. He has just published a book entitled Continent Without Borders the key points of which were published on a full page of the leading French daily Le Soir, weekend edition of 29-30 September. Those who believe they can defeat Francken and his fellow thinkers by applying pejorative labels to them, i.e. by ad hominem argumentation instead of engaging in point for point debate may be in for a surprise in May 2019 no less stunning than the Brexit vote or the 2016 US presidential vote.

Know your enemy! In that spirit I joined my wife last night to attend a panel discussion at the Press Club of Brussels organized by Democrats Abroad Belgium that promised a lively cocktail party if uncertain and possibly repugnant political content.

I say “enemy” because I lost whatever hopes I had for the Democratic Party at some point in the first year of the Obama Administration when I came to see that my vote had been stolen under false pretenses and that the candidate, now president was a bait and switch tactical operation by his party, put in place to implement the very opposite of what he said to catch our votes, particularly in the realm of foreign policy, which is the side of US politics that interests me most. Moreover, at about the same time I came to understand that the local expat organization, Democrats Abroad Belgium, was in 2008 not merely headed by a young chap working at NATO who was being steered by handlers, but that those handlers, all “retired” US intelligence officers, had no room for dissident views in their little tent. And so I moved on, re-registered myself as an Independent, and did not look back. Until last night.

The overseas country associations of America’s two dominant political parties, the Democrats and Republicans, have traditionally existed in a passive state most of the time, coming alive before each general election every two years to execute their primary obligation of getting out the vote: encouraging expatriates to carry out their civic duty and vote, and/or helping them to do just that by getting absentee ballots from the electoral officials in the district of their last residence in the USA, a task that is often more tedious and prone to failure than it need be, depending on any given state. Other functions are optional.

The facts of expat participation in elections underscore the challenge that volunteers in voter registration from both parties face. Out of the six million Americans living abroad, only about 400,000 request and receive absentee ballots. Of these, only about two-thirds actually cast their votes. If this participation rate is raised significantly, it could affect the outcome in some swing states. However, given the very low participation rates, it might pay to rename Americans living abroad as “exiles” rather than “expats.” By this I mean the reasons they are living in Brussels or Paris or London and not in Austin, Texas or Peoria, Illinois may have as much to do with disillusionment with the home country and indifference as they do with fortuitous job assignments abroad. In that sense, the threat of Hollywood celebrities and others to leave the States if Trump won was not a new phenomenon at all, just a new iteration of 2% of Americans opting out that has been going on for a very long time.

To its credit, the local expat association created by the Democrats in Belgium does somewhat more than operate telephone banks every two years to help would-be voters. It runs discussion groups each and every year, and it hosts events like the one last night in the Press Club of Brussels, which served first quality wines that cost a pretty penny and was better organized and more informative about general political trends in the US than I had anticipated.

Indeed, the evening was remarkable precisely because, for the most part, the organizers showed themselves to be candid and reasonable in understanding their party’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016, as well as the uphill battle Democrats face if they are to avert another Trump victory in 2020. Trump supporters were characterized as people you know around you, maybe even a cousin or other family member, not as the “basket of deplorables” per Hillary Clinton during the campaign. This level of insight and openness goes well beyond what you could expect from people who still take The New York Times at face value as great journalism to be imbibed daily, which was also in the air.

To be sure, the ubiquitous belief that the Russians had hacked the 2016 elections and had abused social networks to influence the elections was repeated from the dais. But that was an almost mindless “hail Mary” which ran up against the conscious and far more revealing explanation of the loss to Trump as the result of a massive rejection of Hillary within the Democratic Party. Republicans held their noses and voted for Trump, we were told, whereas Democrats could not bring themselves to go to the polls to support Hillary.

There is an explanation for this candor and detachment here in Brussels from the Democratic mainstream mantra in the USA that we call “Russia-gate,” meaning Trump collusion with the Kremlin. That is the story still promoted by the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the other party bosses. But the overseas Democrats, as it turns out, voted 3 to 1 in the primaries for Bernie Sanders and they just kept walking when he was knocked out by Hillary, notwithstanding their hero’s call to close ranks.

Why is this so? Here again, the explanations from the dais last night were very revealing: expats in Europe have seen in their daily lives that Social Democracy works, that it means free higher education, universal medical care and the other social benefits that the Continental USA refuses to abide.

For those of us who follow with pleasure Donald’s ongoing destruction of the alliances that undergird US global hegemony and wars without end, the sober pessimism of Democrats Abroad Belgium was very welcome and unexpected news.

On 4 September, I had the good fortune to be present at the press conference and pre-opening tour of the first show in the Hermitage Museum’s fall season, an exhibition entitled The Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer: Masterpieces of The Leiden Collection

Unlike many of the exhibitions at the Hermitage these past few years, the given event consisted not of one or another famous painting on loan from cooperating museums abroad. Rather it renewed the tradition of “blockbuster” shows for which the St Petersburg museum was famous earlier in the tenure of its long-serving director, Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky. To be precise, The Age of Rembrandt presents 82 works from among the leading painters of the Dutch Golden Age. We have here paintings by Rembrandt from both his earliest and mature periods, as well as Frans Hals and Johannes Vermeer, and paintings by Rembrandt’s students including Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck.

The unusual feature of the show is that the Hermitage included 8 works from its own collection to complement the works from the Leiden Collection. The logic for doing so is impeccable: the Hermitage has one of the most important collections of Rembrandt and the Dutch masters from among all the world’s museums. The Leiden Collection is the largest private holding of paintings by Rembrandt and his circle. And both collections were assembled in a similar manner though the collectors are separated in time by 250 years. The U.S. billionaire Thomas Kaplan, who began assembling his collection in 2003, relied on his personal emissaries and dealers to pounce on works in private hands as they became available for acquisition, knowingly following in the tradition of Russian Empress Catherine the Great who had done the same in her time. As the collecting passion gathered pace, Kaplan was acquiring one artwork per week. Today his collection numbers 250 paintings and drawings.

Anonymity has been a big feature of Kaplan’s art collecting. Until a couple of years ago, his collection was being lent out anonymously to art museums work by work on a temporary basis. It bears mention that the Kaplans chose not to keep a single work acquired in their homes but to make everything accessible to the public. Nor did they name their collection after themselves, but instead chose to call it the Leiden Collection after the Dutch city where Rembrandt and fellow masters of the Dutch Golden Age were long based. To this day the Leiden Collection, nominally domiciled in New York, has no permanent building of its own.

After reaching a critical mass, Kaplan took his collection in a new direction, to exhibitions in major museums and personally stepped out of the shadows to present what he has accumulated. The first such show was in 2014 in the Louvre, where the directors of the Hermitage and of Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Art caught up with him and agreed an eventual showing in both Moscow and St Petersburg. After that the collection was presented in the National Museum of Beijing and in the Long Museum in Shanghai.

This year 2018 Kaplan’s showings in Russia ran from March through July at the Pushkin Museum while the show that opened on 5 September in the Hermitage closes on 13 January 2019.

From the words of Thomas Kaplan at the press conference, it is obvious that the show in St Petersburg is the high point of his venture into the art world. He may not be awarded the decoration of Chevalier of culture that the French bestowed on him, but the matching of his works with the collection of Catherine the Great in the rooms of her palace surely provided a still greater boost of pride given Kaplan’s enthusiasm for Russian culture, about which I will speak in a moment.

Just as his amassing and initial presentation of works in the Leiden Collection was done anonymously, so Kaplan has carefully kept much of his private life hidden from the public. His entry in Wikipedia reads like a Public Relations release, raising more questions than it answers about who he is and how he became the billionaire patron of the arts we saw in the Hermitage Theater.

We are told that he earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at Oxford. However, that in itself is quite extraordinary for an American born in New York and raised in Florida. To be sure, American elites do sometimes see their offspring off to Oxford, usually for one year, as Rhodes scholars following their graduation from some Harvard or Yale. Bill Clinton is a prime example. However, to take a four year course at Oxford and then proceed to a doctorate there is a rare choice which begs for an explanation.

He has a doctorate in history. Which history? We are not told , though we know his doctoral dissertation was on “the Malayan counterinsurgency and the way in which commodities influence strategic planning.”

There is no obvious link between a doctorate in history and commodities trading, not to mention investment in exploration for and production of precious metals and hydrocarbons, which made Kaplan his billion. Physics or advanced mathematics are fields of study that more commonly lead to the kind of career Kaplan pursued to fortune.

The public record tells us, however, that already during his Oxford years Kaplan was working on the side as an analyst covering Israeli companies. His Israeli-based in-laws may have been the bridge to his future. It was through them that he was introduced to Israeli investor Avi Tiomkin who hired him as a junior partner in 1991. The rest, as they say, is history.

Kaplan’s financial interests have focused on basic values, gold, in particular. In this sense, it should come as no surprise that his artistic taste was in proven long-term value as well: Rembrandt and the Dutch masters. During his brief introductory speech, he mentioned his surprise when he embarked on his collecting activities that so much had remained in private hands and that so much was affordable. Affordable to a billionaire, one might respond coldly. But it would appear that his purchases were in the range or tens of thousands to $5 million for a single acquisition. In this sense, he was able to achieve far more than had he held a passion for modern art, where figures can easily be an order of magnitude greater and where problems of authenticity are also more challenging.

Thomas Kaplan made his money in precious metals and hydrocarbons, industrial sectors in which Russia plays a leading world role. Yet, it would appear that Kaplan’s investment and production activities have never crossed the Russian border. Instead they have been concentrated, in the United States, in the Americas and in South Africa. The single investment bet which brought him the greatest part of his capital was in nonconventional gas in a Texas sand basin, where he and his co-investors created one of the most valuable assets in the energy sector in the past couple of decades that they eventually sold on.

So where is the tie-in with Russia that figured so prominently in his introductory remarks? Both in Kaplan’s speech to the press conference and in response to questions from journalists, it was clear that the bond is firstly family related and secondly purely intellectual in nature.

Cherchez la femme! Kaplan’s Israeli wife came from Russian-born parents, and today, he explains, Russian is spoken in his home whenever his wife, mother-in-law and others want to keep secrets from him. Put more generally, he related that his family’s heritage goes much farther back in time in Russia than in the USA. And Thomas Kaplan has found the time to dust off this tradition. In 2014, he took his children to Russia for the first time to visit the Hermitage, among other sites.

As for the intellectual attraction, Kaplan stressed his love for Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and the gold standard of Russian classical literature. As a justification for his art collecting passion, he eagerly cited Dostoevsky’s remark that if anything will save humanity it is beauty.

Kaplan’s acknowledged love for Russian culture stands out as truly remarkable today given America’s ongoing Russophobia, which has infected Uptown Manhattan’s liberal Jewish progressive communities of which Kaplan is otherwise a member in good standing. Let us hope he has the courage to deliver the same message on Russia in his own back yard.

The 4th Eastern Economic Forum which held its plenary session on Wednesday, 12 September and heard important addresses from its host, Vladimir Putin, and from a constellation of Northeast Asian leaders, has received a smattering of attention in the world press, highlighting only a few elements in what has been a cornucopia of material for analysis in the economic, geopolitical and defense spheres.

Some picked up Vladimir Putin’s well planted remarks in questioning following his address, when he commented on the Skripal case, saying that the Russian suspects named a week ago by British Prime Minister Theresa May as military intelligence (GRU) operatives had presented themselves and were just ordinary citizens, not criminals. Some turned their attention to the Vostok-18 military exercises going on nearby in the Russian Far East on a scale not seen since the days of the Soviet Union and with participation of both Chinese and Mongolian units, a first of its kind. There were discussions among analysts over whether the numbers of forces named by the Russians (300,000 fighting men, 1,000 aircraft, 36,000 tanks and armored personnel carriers) were not inflated and whether the exercise truly demonstrated Russia’s force projection capabilities across the 7,000 km of the Federation in tight timelines. Some very few, like The Financial Times, looked at the economic significance of the Forum taken on its own merits. The FT published an article on the risk calculations behind ongoing Chinese investments in the Russian Far East and in the Russian Federation more generally.

No mainstream commentators to my knowledge have examined the dynamics of the Northeast Asian leaders among themselves.

In the day preceding the formal opening of the Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin held bilateral meetings with the lead guest, Chinese President Xi Jinping. He also met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. In both cases, the talks were followed by lengthy statements to the press that were substantial and worthy of our time.

Still more interesting were the appearances of the five national leaders present on the dais at the plenary session. It was a rare occasion to witness the presidents of Russia, China and Mongolia, the prime ministers of Japan and South Korea sitting together, hearing one another’s addresses and responding to questions.

The questioning was all the more relevant because, breaking with the recent tradition in Russian economic and political forums, the moderator came not from NBC or Bloomberg, who brought coy or hectoring questions to amuse Western audiences by standing up to the authoritarian in the Kremlin, but from one of Russia’s most capable and most watched television journalists, Sergei Brillyov (Rossiya-1). His questions had likely been coordinated with the Kremlin in advance and were more probing and revealing than anything we have seen hitherto in such formats.

In what follows, I will direct attention to one highly important and obvious feature of the proceedings which seems to have escaped the attention of my peers: what the speeches and public meetings of the leaders tell us about Shinzo Abe and Japan’s political positioning in its region.

I do this taking advantage of the fly-on-the-wall privileged observation post that Russian state television granted to its global audience by presenting full live coverage, without commentary, of the plenary session addresses, of the statements to the press made by Vladimir Putin and his honored guests following their bilateral meetings ahead of the Forum’s opening, and of other significant moments in and around the Forum. While my peers in North America may have been fast asleep, given the time differences, here in Europe the Russian broadcasts from the Far East arrived at breakfast time or later, making it possible to apply a fresh mind to tantalizing incoming images and speeches.

First, it has to be said that Prime Minister Abe was odd man out.. He used his address to the plenary session primarily as a plea for conclusion of a peace treaty with Russia during this generation, during his own and Vladimir Putin’s mandates in office.. By contrast, all of the other foreign leaders spoke glowingly of their ongoing and planned large-scale investment activities in Russia and the Far Eastern region. Abe had little to match their cooperation with Russia and sought to compensate by presenting a video that would put a human face on Japan’s miniscule efforts in Russia. The film was a brief overview of the various health related and technology related projects (traffic management, refuse reprocessing) that Japan is implementing in Russia from among the 150 projects that Abe had presented and Russia accepted two years ago, all to guide their bilateral relations to a new plateau.

The Japanese projects are all on the cheap. All are quite modest in scope and are meant to be indicative of the great assistance Japan can bestow on Russia in improving people’s lives if only Russia signs a peace treaty as dictated by Tokyo, meaning its agreement to the return of the Southern Kurile islands to Japanese sovereignty.

The effect of the video and recitation of Japanese cooperation projects in Russia is quite the opposite of what Abe may have intended. But it is perfectly in line with his wholly outdated understanding of the relative negotiating positions of Russia and Japan today. The film’s editorial slant is all one-way: a wealthy and technologically superior Japan is lending a hand to a grateful Russia. This contradicts the overall theme of the other foreign leaders speaking to the Forum, which is how all the participating countries will help one another by closer coordination of their development plans, by mutual trade and investment.

We saw this balanced and win-win approach in the presentation of the South Korean prime minister, who mentioned his country’s participation in the construction of Russia’s largest shipbuilding complex (Zvezda) close to Vladivostok, while remaining a major supplier of advanced vessels to Russia for transporting liquefied natural gas. Or in South Korea’s eagerness to implement through rail transit to the Trans-Siberian and onward to Europe as soon as relations with North Korea can be normalized. And in the Korean participation in the North Sea route infrastructure for maritime shipping that Russia is keen to develop as an alternative to the routes via the Suez Canal or around the horn of Africa.

We saw this in the address of the Mongolian president describing joint energy projects with Russia and plans/hopes for expanded shipment of coal via Russia’s rail and port infrastructure, both what exists and what is under planning.

Shinzo Abe’s approach to Russia harks back to the 1970s and 1980s, when Japan was enjoying worldwide respect and envy as a dynamic Asian tiger that was buying up properties in the United States right and left and when the Soviet Union was in serious economic stagnation if not decline, looking for new buyers of its energy resources and new investors.

Today China occupies the position of strategic partner to which Japan pretended forty years ago. China is Russia’s major financier, investor and customer. China may not rank as highly as supplier of advanced technology as Japan did back then and continues to be today, but China is an equal partner with Russia in joint development of high-tech, as in the domain of civil aviation.

The present-day importance of Chinese trade and investment was one of the outstanding messages of the Forum. In the meeting with the press after their bilateral talks, Vladimir Putin affirmed that two-way trade with China this year will grow by more than 20% to top 100 billion dollars. Meanwhile, in the addresses to the plenary session the figure 100 billion came up again: this time quantifying the value of the joint Chinese-Russian investment projects directed at the Far Eastern and Baikal regions.

Against this background, the scale of Japanese investment and the whole of Abe’s 150 cooperation projects come in two orders of magnitude less. The notion that these “carrots” could motivate Russia to agree to Japanese conditions for concluding a peace treaty is wholly unrealistic.

Abe’s proffered sweetener of joint administration of the Southern Kuriles intentionally misses the point of Russian resistance to abandoning sovereignty. What is really at issue was brought up directly by Sergei Brillyov in a question to Vladimir Putin during the plenary session: whether the two leaders have not discussed Russian concerns that the Kuriles, if held by Japan, would become yet another stationing point for American military bases and in particular for the installation of anti-ballistic missile units. Putin said they had, but this is something that Abe chooses to ignore as the stumbling block to conclusion of a peace treaty.

In what he described as a “spontaneous” suggestion to achieve the sought-after peace treaty, Putin proposed on stage that the two countries proceed to sign a peace treaty “without preconditions” before the end of this year. Then, having become friends, they might tackle the thorny issues like the Kuriles with more mutual confidence. This proposal, which Abe later acknowledged he was hearing for the first time, was later dismissed as unworkable by the Japanese diplomats present.

Put in other words, Russia does not agree to concessions so long as it sees Japan as a stalking horse for the United States and its Pentagon. And by his performance in the Forum, Abe demonstrated yet again that obedience to his masters in Washington for the sake of the nuclear umbrella is more important to him than striking any deal with the Russians. He alone among the five leaders put the name of Donald Trump in play from the dais: he extended his fulsome praise to Trump for an innovative and brave outreach to North Korea, for holding a summit with Kim Jong-Un. No mention on his part of the initiative shown first and shown again most recently by the South Korean leader Moon Jae-In to bring the talks to a constructive finale between the Koreas and between the USA and North Korea.

Japan is nowhere on the map of strategic and large-scale economic integration of the region that includes but goes well beyond what was on show in the Forum. The other binding forces are China’s Belt and Road initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union. Shinzo Abe’s Japan remains a US outpost largely cut off from its geographical and business environment in Northeast Asia. It is missing out on the dynamic processes energizing the whole area. At the Forum. China was the single largest player with its delegation exceeding 2,000 businessmen and government representatives. Under leadership as stale and timid as Shinzo Abe proved to be at the Forum, his country is fated to become the Land of the Setting Sun.

Earlier today, RT released an interview which their editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan had with the two “suspects” whom Prime Minister Theresa May identified to Parliament last week.

The upshot of this interview is that the Russian position has changed substantially from what it has been over the past four months: “give us the proofs” of the crime and our involvement.

The testimony of the two suspects, Russian citizens Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Bashirov, amounts to a direct refutation of the entire “facts” or “evidence” presented by London last week to support their story on the poisoning.

Now there are only two conclusions possible:

A) that London has concocted the Skripal case from start to finish; British intelligence staged the poisoning and after much effort combing the CCTV footage for Russians who arrived in the UK and who traveled to Salisbury just before the poisoning, they produced the falsified photos of the suspects released last week. Falsified in the sense that the novichok supposedly found in their hotel room was planted after the fact by MI6, and that the CCTV records have been tampered with to suit the timelines over two days in a scenario devised by MI6. In this case, the whole case should be properly investigated by neutral third parties.

OR

B) that the Russians are lying from start to finish and these two suspects should be properly interrogated by neutral third parties,

I personally believe in the “A” case.

Other commentators have looked for flaws in each aspect of the British story from the first moment of the poisoning straight through the identical time records on the CCTV snapshot of the two suspects coming through passport and customs upon arrival in the UK on a direct flight from Moscow. These issues are all debatable. I look instead to the important circumstantial evidence in the way each episode in the Skripal case has been publicized by British authorities at chosen intervals so as to hit the newsrooms at moments that have great political sensitivity for Russia.

The poisoning itself came just two weeks before the March presidential elections. Further revelations came just before the opening of the World Cup and now the release of the months old CCTV pictures comes just prior to the Russian backed Syrian offensive to crush jihadists in Idlib province that will mark the total victory of Russian foreign and military policy over US and Western policy in Syria and the immediate region.

.All of the Skripal revelations have been stage managed to do maximum damage to Russia’s image in the international community and/or to influence political processes within Russia.

The objective of the Skripal case, was to present the “Putin regime” as a wanton user of chemical weapons abroad and place it on a par with Bashar Assad’s Syria as a pariah state.

Whatever one’s persuasions may be, it is clear that the Btitish and Russian accounts are now in direct contradiction, We are headed for a continued and still more dramatic political confrontation between the two countries and their allies.